As often happens a creative impulse comes to me while I’m doing something else “non-creatively” speaking. I had recently received “The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots” but felt daunted by all of the verbiage at the front of the book describing how to use it. In retrospect, given what happened, some “Other” part of me was listening and I might say excited.
As I was puttering around my office a few days later a voice said “open the AHDIER at random, pick 20 roots, use the first definition and make a poem now”.
Here it is:
The Last Banana
To push off
To cut emulsion
Hidden, turn
Navel blackened by fire
Lack of whole
Burning summer
Speak firmly
Leap, man!
Pouring flat
Mild crawling
Now consider what is happening to us, to nature, to life
Bumbles went out for a walk in the river valley near his home. At sunset he climbed a hill. Something new found him.1 Being an artist photographer he related as the blue disc pulsed in his coat pocket. Of course he didn’t notice.
He dreamt that night. In the morning after recording his dream, feeling very disturbed by his dream experience he wrote a poem:
Dark Star Turns
Walking in nature
River valley eroded
Slopes of golden earth
Washing away
A woman walks past
In her hands
4 pointed black star
Turning
“I’m in pain” she says
Later
Another woman
More known to me
Standing behind a low wall
Separate
Turning the dark star
“I’m dying” she says
Forehead deeply frowning
“Can I help” I say
“Apocalyptic” says she
Cradling her head
So sensitive to touch
She’s dying in my arms
Later in the evening, riding a stationary bike Bumbles feels his mouth speak out:
Abscesses Everywhere
My mouth wants to explode with anger over willfulness
Power and control through will
The mantra of our day
In service to narcissistic egos
See me
Admire me
Follow me
I Will you to
I WILL use your desires against you
You may not know it is my WILL
Behind the smiling pictures I post
The successful life of shallow
My teeth fall out
My gums bleed
Over the Dark Star of Will
Turning and turning you around
Turning and turning our souls
Into Gordian knots of death
A dark angel’s got you
On a starry cross
Unless you let go Of WILL
HOW??
Bleed, BLEED into the abyss
Of You
Deep in your chasm
A bubbling voice
Of love
Guarded by
Silver crowned
Cockroach queen
What’s not to love?
Says she
Bumbles felt it was best to have the reader look up palimpsest and read John Woodcock’s article, then look at the second picture again.
(1) Woodcock, John. Palimpsest: Phenomemology of a Possible Space-Time, Academia.edu., February 20, 2023
Bumbles sighed as he put the book down for the final time. A curious read he thought. How could one differentiate between fact and fiction when the details of the lives of the protagonists were unknown to him? Perhaps that wasn’t the point though. Absent-mindedly he caressed the small blue disk in his pocket. Later, after a meal and a walk in the local park, he went to bed early. He ususally didn’t do this but something was pushing him to it this night. Mike was already asleep on “his” side of the bed (the end). Bumbles sleep was restless as he seemed to be wrestling with some sort of difficulty. The blue disc vibrated at a low level under his pillow pulsing heart like. In the morning Bumbles awoke feeling aweful. Nevethless he recorded his dreams as he ate breakfast. As the day progressed he felt the threads connecting the book and his dreams precipitate into an image. After supper, where Mike refused to eat even raw steak, Bumbles went for a walk in the woods beside the local river, at dusk. He always liked this time. Shadows revealing much more than just frights. What he was doing was holding the image from earlier in the day. Suddenly, after a glance into a thicket, the new connection presented itself to him. Garth rushed home to write his inspiration down. This is what he wrote:
Is There a Difference Between … ?
A mouse licking litmus paper and a nuclear bomb?
“Normal” life and death?
Nightmares and the nightmare of “normal” life?
A whale swimming in the sea and a seal swimming with plastic loops around its neck?
Electric cars and a dead child miner?
More money and the Etruscan shrew?
Spring tails and asphalt pavement
Ragnarok and Thanatos?
Mushroom mycelia and rusting bones?
A new story and a story newly told?
Egoic nuance and personal vendetta?
Denial and dialing a wrong number?
Truth, Beauty and Love and Money, Power and Choice?
Money as God and God as money?
Ecoterrorism and reading a newspaper?
Phages and a tazer?
Fertilizer and hunger going Boom?
COVID 19 and KN95 masks hanging upward?
Ghosts and stories of putrefaction?
Mystery and ARV?
Altruism in plants and farming trees?
Body torture and 2,4-dihydroxy-7-methoxy-2-1,4-benzoxazin-3(4H)-one?
Petrichor and petroleum?
The eye of the needle and sitting on an old log?
An asylum full of scientists and scientists full of asylum?
Breathing towards Mystery and AI?
Creating something new and destroying creation?
Sing a song of thirds to finish*
* Based on the book “When We Cease to Understand the World” by Benjamin Labatut
Bumbles put down his pen and looked for the blue disc. It was missing AGAIN!!
